When the Goat Bites
by The Amazing Anigirl
Summary: Four weeks have passed since Mae and Company destroyed the Cult. Possum Springs is abuzz with rumor and worry concerning the many missing members of their community, including the most prominent police officer, Molly. With the Holidays coming up it looks like Mae and her gang of rejects are going to have to make another trip into the woods. Family is family, after all


Greetings and salutations, everyone! It's time for me to start another story because a plot bunny bit my ankle and is refusing to let go until I get a few chapters down. Yaaaaay!

So, Night in the Woods. Let me tell you, as a twenty year old who's having trouble adjusting to the adult wood and watching everything she knew well during childhood wither away before her eyes (yay?) I REALLY identified with this game. It is awesome, and it also has an open ending, which gives me license to write stuff.

Now, fair warning, especially for all of you flitting over from my Undertale fanfic, The Machine: unlike with Undertale, I have NOT played this game extensively. I've only watched Jacksepticeye's playthrough, read some articles on the wiki, and the TVTropes page, so I am NOT as familiar with every detail as I would like to be. I was going to buy the game, but frankly Steam has sales all the time and I'd rather wait until it drops from 19.99 to something more affordable for a minimum wage earning college student. Once that happens, I'll most definitely give it my own little go. Until then, if I get a detail wrong or don't notice something, please tell me and I'll correct it or do an edit! Also note that because of this, updates might be slow on this one, even slower than on my other fics, as I want to rewatch the playthrough a few times before I get too deep in this.

One more little detail: Mae is half Jewish in this story. No idea if that idea is contradicted in the game, but it's what I'm rollin' with. Borowski is, to my Ashkenazi oriented ears, a very Jewish last name, so I decided to roll with that. Write what you know and all that!

But you don't care about that, you want the story! So let's begin! Of course, reviews and critiques are welcome and appreciated even if they're only one word! So if you like what's below, please review and thanks for reading!

Let's start!

EDIT: Special thanks to reviewer GreatWolfSpirit for the editing comment: autocorrect is a wonderful and often awful thing :D

* * *

Chrismikkah was only one of the many things adulthood had to ruin.

When Mae had been little it had been one of her favorite times of the year, right alongside Harfest and her birthday (if only she'd known how much it would suck to be an adult, she wouldn't have been so chipper when it came time to light another candle). One might think that being in a mixed-religion family-much less a mixed religion family that had the only Jew in Possum Springs as the Patriarch-would be confusing and alienating for a child.

Nope. All it meant was that she had an excuse to play dreidel with her friends in kindergarten when they should have been reading (which the teachers had excused because something something culture something something diversity something) and she got extra presents. Her dad wasn't a religious man, which was good since if he had been he would have needed to start his own one-man synagogue, but he cared enough about his origins to insist to his Christian wife that Mae, at the very least, grow up with Hanukah. Candy Borowski had agreed happily: it gave her a perfect excuse to learn how to make fried doughnuts.

Hanukah was an indecisive holiday. When it started and when it ended changed from year to year. She'd asked her father why the Jews couldn't just pick a day and stick with it and his response had been something something Lunar Calendar something something tradition something.

It didn't bother her too much. If anything, it had made it more exciting for her baby self, tearing the next page off the calendar when December came around and discovering how long she would have to wait for her extra days of gifts.

Her absolute favorite time for Hanukkah to fall was Christmas. Then the holidays would be combined into Chrismikkah. An explosion of holiday cheer. A deluge of presents. A veritable smorgasbord of fun. Plus her mom made candy-cane doughnuts, which Bea decried as disgusting but Mae could eat until her guts gave out and still want more.

This year was a Chrismikkah year, which would normally make any issue Mae was dealing with seem less burdensome. Chrismikkah had been one particular thing she was looking forward to when she had dropped out of college. It would be more calming and therapeutic than a million journal entries. It would be the perfect excuse to be around everyone she knew and loved, to see them instead of a bunch of shapes at her school.

Nope.

Maybe it all would have been fine if it weren't for That Night in the Woods, as she and her friends had dubbed their little adventure. Four weeks had passed and she was still having nightmares about nearly meeting a gruesome end via her own personal elevator phobia…not to mention the whole murderous cultists worshipping a demon and sacrificing old school friends thing, that sucked too. Significantly more, in fact. The whole situation sucked, but it might have sucked less if everyone would just shut up about all of the people who were missing.

Not that she could really _blame_ them, of course: the whole of the town council had vanished in the middle of the night without a trace, them and a seemingly random smattering of not-so-innocent civilians. Selmers was having a field day writing poetry for everyone who was gone: her poetry had never been more need to comfort those wringing their paws and wings over their missing husbands.

Mae and her company of friends, of course, regarded all of this sorrow and worry with awkward silence (except Angus, who continued to firmly insist that the cultists had gotten what they deserved). They still hadn't managed to muster up the courage or the words to tell Casey's parents what had become of their child, even though Gregg and Mae had both agreed that it needed to be said. Thus, as far as the town knew, the four young adults had nothing to do with the missing people.

Mae might have cared much less about all of this, and she might have even regarded all of this sadness with the sort of resigned coldness Angus did, if it weren't for the fact that her mother had been stopping by Selmers' porch to ask for poems. Poems for her missing sister, Molly.

Mae's aunt had been missing since That Night in the Woods, and for the past four weeks or so Mae had been coming up with every sort of strange and surreal story to explain her aunt's absence. Maybe she had been apprehending a juvenile delinquent when that delinquent reveled itself to be a Genie, which had finally granted Molly's wish to abandon everyone she knew and live a life of luxury in Paris. Maybe she had finally been put in a situation where she needed to use her firearm, but found it only produced a cartoonish little 'Bang!' flag and confetti, thus leading to her getting shot up by a bunch of Mafia agents. Maybe she had heroically defended some old coot from a bunch of muggers only for that old coot to turn out to be a deranged murderer who beat her to death with his cane and used her body to fertilize his lawn.

Not exactly pleasant excuses, but anything was better than the notion that, day by day, became more and more likely.

Molly had been down there. Molly was in the Cult. Molly had murdered Casey. Casey, maybe Bruce…Mae shook her head at the mere thought.

She would be a filthy liar if she declared that she had always secretly loved Aunt Molly. Molly was a hardass, especially to her: although Mae always sensed the love behind her aunt's constant rebukes, there was always an edge of frustration in the cop's tone whenever she spoke to her niece.

But Aunt-Mallcop wasn't a villain. Hardass though she was, she was a lawwoman. She had become a cop out of a desire to do good by Possum Springs and its residents, _all_ of its residents. She would never agree to join those madmen, or look the other way as they committed their crimes.

And yet…all of those strange things she had said, the strange ways she had reacted to them finding the arm or her seeing the 'ghost'. She hadn't reacted with the sort of terror one would expect from a cop that saw a severed arm in a small town where such a sighting would normally be the only thing on anyone's lips for weeks. She had almost seemed _scared_ on Harfest, when Mae had seen the kidnapper, in spite of her insistence that she had seen no spirit.

Mae's claws dug into the tablecloth of her kitchen table and she looked from the unlit, wax-coated menorah to the bare Christmas tree. Candy was refusing to decorate it until Molly was safe and sound. She wouldn't participate in any joyful family traditions until she knew what had become of her sister.

The college dropout reached towards the golden candelabra and scraped some of the wax off. Molly always stopped by to help with the Christmas tree. A small smile came to Mae's normally blank face. When she had been _very_ little, Molly had (and she blushed to admit it) been her hero. She had thought having a cop as an aunt was just about the coolest thing in the world and she often imagined how fun and exciting her aunt's job must have been, chasing bad guys and foiling crimes. Of course, age had erased such innocent and childish notions, but she still fondly remembered when Molly had lifted her to the top of the Christmas tree so she could put the star on, or when she'd playfully pulled her away from the menorah before she could try and blow out the candles.

She flicked a small chunk of wax into the sink and huffed, standing.

"Mom!" she cried, turning away from the pictures on the walls. "Mom, I'm going out to see what Gregg's doing!"

"All right, sweetie!" Candy's voiced echoed from upstairs, and Mae felt her heart tremble. Candy's tender voice had been tinged with fear ever sinc her sister had stopped returning her calls.

Mae stood at the foot of the stairs, staring upwards. Mom was probably in her room, lying down, staring at the ceiling, stewing with worry. A little pocket of hell, just like Casey's parents had been forced to endure. To love someone and lose them without knowing if you had really lost them.

"Shit…" whispered the young woman, barreling out the door, her heart pulling her back to the woods even as her mind, desperate to maintain what little peace she had earned and desperate to maintain her image of Aunt Molly, insisted that such a venture was worthless.

She looked over her shoulder as she trudged up the sidewalk towards the Snack Falcon. The light in her parents' room was off.


End file.
